During that campaign, the Mamluks, spread along the coastal road and cut off from each other at various points, were constantly harried by the mountaineers, who confiscated their weapons, horses and money.

The second campaign was launched in 1300 to punish the mountaineers for attacking and robbing Mamluk troops retreating along the coastal road following their rout by the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Wadi al-Khaznadar the year before.

The viceroy of Damascus, Aqqush al-Afram, defeated the Kisrawani fighters in a number of engagements, after which they conceded, handed over the weapons they had confiscated in 1292 and paid a heavy fine.

Maronite, Shia and Druze historians have each sought to emphasize the roles of their respective confessional group, over each other, in defending the autonomy of the Kisrawan from Mamluk outsiders.

The distance of Mount Lebanon from the central government and renewed assaults by the Byzantines, viewed as natural allies of the Christians, contributed to Abbasid anxieties.

In response, the Abbasids installed Muslim emirs from the Tanukh tribe in the hills around Beirut, south of the Kisrawan, to strengthen their authority in the region in the mid-8th century.

[3] Under Muslim rule, Christians were mandated to pay the jizya, a form of poll tax, though its actual collection in Mount Lebanon was likely done on an inconsistent basis.

[4] In response to an Abbasid tax levy in 759, the Christians in the Munaytara region immediately north of the Kisrawan revolted against the government, in coordination with the Byzantines.

[7] According to the historian Ja'far al-Muhajir, pro-Alid and Shia-leaning Muslims, represented by the tribes of Hamdan and Madh'hij in local tradition, could have settled in nearby Dinniyeh to the north after the Hasan–Muawiya treaty in 661.

[8] The Druze religion, which branched off of Isma'ili Shia Islam in the early 11th century, gained adherents among people in Mount Lebanon and its environs, including much of the Tanukh settlers in the hills east of Beirut.

Certain aspects of the faith, such as transmigration of souls between adherents, were viewed as heretical and foreign by Sunni and Shia Muslims, but contributed to solidarity among the Druze, who closed their religion to new converts in 1046 due to the threat of persecution.

The emirate of Tripoli along the coast adjacent to Mount Lebanon, ruled by a family of Twelver Shia jurists since 1065, and the Tanukhs, maintained their autonomy amid Seljuk internal squabbles.

[8] Ibn al-Athir relates that Tripoli was heavily pillaged, many of the inhabitants' treasures were seized, and many others fled to different places to avoid the Crusaders' attacks.

[15] In 1266–1268 and 1283, the Sunni Mamluks, who had succeeded the Ayyubids in Islamic Syria in 1260, raided the Maronite countryside of Tripoli, namely the mountains of Bsharri and Byblos, both north of the Kisrawan.

[16] The Mamluk sultan Qalawun (r. 1271–1290) likely intended to suppress the potential resistance of the Maronite mountaineers of Tripoli's hinterland in preparation of his planned siege of the city.

[19] The new rulers remained on guard for potential seaborne Crusader assaults on the Levantine coast in the west and joint military offensives with the Mongols, who were established north and east of the Mamluk empire.

While the mostly Christian or non-Sunni Muslim-populated mountain regions between the coast and the interior plains of the Levant were not treated with suspicion as potential Crusader allies by the Mamluks, the Kisrawan's inhabitants were viewed differently.

[20] According to Harris, the "anomaly" that the Kisrawan presented with regard to its strategic location and historically Crusader-friendly population, "predisposed the Mamluks to military action".

[21] Following the withdrawal of the Crusaders, the Mamluks launched a punitive expedition against the mountaineers of the Kisrawan and the landlocked Jurd area immediately to its south in July 1292.

[23] Al-Ayni held that Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil (r. 1290–1293) ordered the operation in response to the mountaineers' blockading of the coastal road between Beirut and the Kisrawan.

The Mamluk commanders in Damascus, to whom the task was charged, were wary of combating large numbers of battle-hardened mountaineers in the narrow passes of the Kisrawan.

[23] In response to Damascene reticence, the sultan commissioned his Egypt-based viceroy Badr al-Din Baydara, who led a 3,000-strong army northward through the Levantine coast until reaching the Kisrawan.

[23] Upon the Mamluks' arrival, Maronite villagers rang their church bells to alert their muqaddams ("chiefs"), who met and drafted attack plans.

A panicked Mamluk flight was precipitated, with troops marching south along the Levantine coast until crossing east into the Beqaa Valley from Beirut.

In the assessment of Harris, "reduction of the Kisrawan required the main Mamluk field army", which was preoccupied in the war with the Mongols led by Ghazan.

[35] The 14th-century historian Abu al-Fida of Hama noted that the Mamluks "killed and seized all the Alawites and renegades they encountered, and other heretics, and cleared them out of the hills".

[31] In early 1306,[13] A number of Sunni Muslim Turkmen tribesmen who had settled in the Akkar and Koura hinterlands north and south of Tripoli city after the collapse of the Crusader state were resettled in the Kisrawan.

[40] The historian Kamal Salibi notes that Christians became a larger segment of the Kisrawan's population after the campaign, but "suffered from the expeditions as much as did the heterodox Muslims".

[22] In the historian Stefan Winter's assessment, the campaigns had little to do with religious zeal and were driven by the mountaineers' attacks against Mamluk troops in 1292 and 1300 and a tax rebellion in 1305.

[29][30] The Kisrawan campaigns are among "the most contested issues in Lebanese historiography" due largely to the "evidence they appear to give of the region's demographic composition", according to Winter.